The forgetting of relation: towards a co-existential

analytic

Paul SimpsonLecturer in Human Geography

Plymouth Universitypaul.simpson@plymouth.ac.uk

Overview• the relationship between method,

methodology, and post-phenomenology

• Questioning the status and nature of relationality in post-phenomenology

• Questioning the socio-political status of such an understanding of relationality.

Methods, Methodology, and post-phenomenology

• Questions raised about methods by theories of practice, new materialisms, relationality, non-representational theories, etc. as well as by post-phenomenologists

• Need for new methods/techniques?– Video methods

• Need to revised old methods/techniques?– Mobile methods

• From concern with methods/techniques to a concern with a more general mode of analysis

From being-there to being-with

“Dasein has already revealed itself as being-with and reveals itself as such before any other explication” (p27)

“thinking, absolutely and without reserve, beginning from the “with”, as the proper existence of one whose Being is nothing other than with-one-another” (Nancy 2000: 34).

Nancy’s account of being-with “…does not altogether do justice to, or sufficiently account for, the way in which the sharing of being is unequally distributed or divided” (p49)

CommunitasMunus (noun): -Duty-Burden-Obligation-Gift

“What holds us in common, or, better, what establishes us as beings-in-common, being-there-with, is that defect, that nonfulfillment, that debt” (Esposito 2013: 25).

“The idea of immunity, which is needed for protecting our life, if carried past a certain threshold, winds up negating life. That is, immunity encages life such that not only is our freedom, but also the very meaning of our individual and collective existence lost: that flow of meaning, that encounter with existence outside of itself that I define with the term communitas, which refers to the constitutively open character of existence” (Esposito 2013: 61)